Ancient & Modern

So I was asked to recommend two science-fiction stories for National Short Story Day, one classic (published before 1960) and one modern. Here are my choices:

In the 1950s James Blish wrote a short series of stories, collected in The Seedling Stars, about what he called pantropy – radically engineering humans to enable them to live on alien worlds. ‘Surface Tension’ is the best of these, a classic tale of human grit and ingenuity, and an epic journey between two puddles. Offspring of the crew of a crashed spaceship have been shrunk to the size of protists so that they can survive in the ponds and lakes of the single muddy landmass of a water planet. Blish expertly describes a fierce microscopic world and the engineering feat of constructing a wooden spaceship that enables the colonists to pierce the surface tension of the sky of their little world, and the story contains one of the finest evocations of science fiction’s sense of wonder when the tiny astronauts first glimpse the night sky: ‘Under the two moons of Hydrot, and under the eternal stars, the two-inch spaceship and its microscopic cargo toiled down the slope towards the drying rivulet.’

Kelly Link is one of the best writers in contemporary science fiction and fantasy, blending tropes from a variety of genres into fresh and vivid fantastikas. In ‘Two Houses’ (2012), first published in an anthology celebrating the work of Ray Bradbury, the twelve passengers on a starship that has lost its sister ship to a cosmic accident are awakened from suspended animation to celebrate a birthday. They tell each other ghost stories, which the ship illustrates with virtual reality projections, and as the boundary between reality and fiction breaks down a very human story of loss slowly emerges. A beautifully mysterious story within a story.

The full list can be found here. Turns out that all the writers asked to contribute were men; it would be very interesting to repeat the exercise with the choices of women writers. What are your favourites?

Links 21/12/13

'The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.'

'“This discovery not only confirms the existence of Neanderthal burials in Western Europe, but also reveals a relatively sophisticated cognitive capacity to produce them,” explains William Rendu, the study’s lead author.'

 'An analysis of a Neanderthal's fossilised hyoid bone - a horseshoe-shaped structure in the neck - suggests the species had the ability to speak. This has been suspected since the 1989 discovery of a Neanderthal hyoid that looks just like a modern human's. But now computer modelling of how it works has shown this bone was also used in a very similar way.'

Christmas Cafes, by Alan Powdrill.

Christmas ornaments carved into skulls.

'Using photo mosaics and elevation data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), this video commemorates the 45th anniversary of Apollo 8's historic flight by recreating the moment when the crew first saw and photographed the Earth rising from behind the Moon:'

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-neanderthal-genome-early-human-interbreeding.html#jCp

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-neanderthal-genome-early-human-interbreeding.html#jCp

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-neanderthal-genome-early-human-interbreeding.html#jCp

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-neanderthal-genome-early-human-interbreeding.html#jCp

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-neanderthal-genome-early-human-interbreeding.html#jCp

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-neanderthal-genome-early-human-interbreeding.html#jCp

Circulating Library

So posting shelfies is a thing now, and here's one of mine. It shows part of my collection of hardbacks and, to the far right and on the floor underneath the bottom shelf, some of my own books, as well as a run of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and about two metres of paperback anthologies.

There are other shelves, of course. The bookcase at the right of the photo mostly contains books about science fiction. In the office, there are also six shelves of double-stacked fiction paperbacks, a couple of shelves of science books and a shelf of oversized books. Not to mention three shelves of books about London, New York and Los Angeles. And then there are the books on the floor of the office, and the rest of the fiction paperbacks in a built-in bookcase on the landing, and the bookshelves in the living room where, amongst others, the graphic novels and books about music and films reside.

But any picture that somehow managed to include all the books in the house (including those in the kitchen, which aren't all cook books, and the various caches of books in the bedroom) would only be a snapshot of single moment in a dynamic ecology. Like universes, book collections expand, contract, or (like mine) achieve a kind of equilibrium.

Books arrive at a slower rate than when I used to regularly review for Interzone (one American publisher used to send me a mailsack stuffed with books every other month), but still they come. At first, they lodge on top of a blanket chest in the office (which also, now I think of it, contains some books on biology left over from my academic career), or on top of the bookcase in the photo. Some are read in the office; others flow downstairs to be read. And then they either leave the house for a charity shop or the tender mercy of a book dealer, or return to the top of the bookcase, where a couple of stacks await proper shelving. Anything that makes the shelves must first dislodge something already there; because there's no room for extra books, there has to be a strict one-in-one-out policy. Once there, they might last five or ten years before I decide that I'm never going to get around to rereading (or re-reading) them and weed them out, or they might become part of the permanent collection. The books that I know I can't ever bear to part with. The sedimentary bedrock whose deepest layer is almost fifty years old now. Sooner or later, all book collectors become librarians of their own lives.

Cry Uncle!

I first discovered J.P. Martin's Uncle books in the late 1960s, in my local library. I was an introverted teenager with a bad reading habit (I spent one rainy fortnight in Bognor Regis reading through about six feet of UFO books in the library - there must have been some serious UFO watchers, in Bognor). I had read everything on the science fiction shelves, and had begun to mine the rest of the adult fiction stacks, picking up whatever hooked my interest, from Beryl Bainbridge and John Updike to Angela Carter and Richard Brautigan. And these odd books with an elephant in a purple dressing-gown on the cover, apparently written for children but shelved with Thomas Mann and Carson McCullers.

Maybe a librarian decided that they were too subversive for children; or (I hope) maybe she thought that adults shouldn't miss out on the fun, and ordered two sets. But by whatever means, it was my great good luck that they ended up there, for here was an antic world that fully engaged the imagination, a kind of cross between Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster novels, and The Goon Show.

Based on stories that J.P.Martin, a Methodist minister, originally told to his children, the Uncle books describe the adventures of their eponymous hero, an immensely rich elephant who lives in a vast and rambling castle, Homestead, whose secrets and geography are unknown even to him:

...try to think of about a hundred skyscrapers all joined together and surrounded by a moat with a drawbridge over it, and you'll get some idea of it. The towers are of many colours, and there are bathing pools and garden among them, also switchback railways running from tower to tower, and water-chutes from top to bottom.

Many dwarfs live in the top storeys. They pay rent to Uncle every Saturday. It's only a farthing a week, but it mounts up when there are thousands of dwarfs.

A slingshot from Homestead's moat is a shantytown, Badfort, where Uncle's rivals guzzle Black Tom and constantly plot his downfall and humiliation. There's also a vast department store close by (possibly modelled on London's lost bazaar, Gamages), where everything is fantastically cheap, and a rival store where the unwary pay equally fantastic high prices. In this pocket universe of vivid contrasts, Uncle is a kind of benevolent dictator who isn't quite as bright as he likes to think he is (despite his BA). He's also something of a snob, but he engages the reader's sympathy because his considerable dignity and boldness is undercut by unexpected reversals and undeserved pratfalls and humiliations during his wars of attrition with his rivals in the shanty town of Badfort. It's a comedy of embarrassment and exasperation akin to Laurel and Hardy.

The first Uncle book I read, Uncle and the Treacle Trouble, was the fourth in the series; I immediately doubled back and read the other three, captivated by the surreal deadpan humour and the richness of Martin's imagined world, full of unmapped mysteries and underpinned by a zany logic. Somehow (probably because I left for university) I missed the last in the series, Uncle and the Battle for Badgertown, and while I kept an eye out for secondhand volumes they seemed to never turn up, and now first editions go for impressively high prices. The Uncle books are scarce, and there are a lot of Uncle fans, including a good number in the SF/F field. Although the first two books were recently reissued by the New York Review of Books in nice hardbacks, the others have long been out of print.

But now, at last, I have all six Uncle books inside the covers of a lovingly-produced omnibus, complete with Sir Quentin Blake's evocative ink-spattered illustrations, and with an introductory essay by James Martin Currey, J.P.Martin's grandson, essays by distinguished fans, and much else. The omnibus is the work of Marcus Gipps (disclosure: he's one of my editors at Gollancz), who funded publication with a Kickstarter campaign that was fully funded within four hours. The original plan was to produce 200 copies; in the end, 750 books have been printed for supporters, and another 750 are available in shops and online. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm about to dive back into Homeward's endless summer...

Links 14/12/13

On this day China's Chang'e Lunar Lander successfully touched down on the Moon at 13:11:18.695 GMT (8:11:18.695 EST). It's the first spacecraft to land on the Moon in 37 years. Here's an animation based on images taken by its landing camera during descent.

'NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has observed water vapor above the frigid south polar region of Jupiter's moon Europa, providing the first strong evidence of water plumes erupting off the moon's surface.'

 'A new analysis of data from NASA's Galileo mission has revealed clay-type minerals at the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa that appear to have been delivered by a spectacular collision with an asteroid or comet. This is the first time such minerals have been detected on Europa's surface. The types of space rocks that deliver such minerals typically also often carry organic materials.'

'Cassini's recent close flybys are bringing into sharper focus a region in Titan's northern hemisphere that sparkles with almost all of the moon's seas and lakes. Scientists working with the spacecraft's radar instrument have put together the most detailed multi-image mosaic of that region to date. The image includes all the seas and most of the major lakes. Some of the flybys tracked over areas that previously were seen at a different angle, so researchers have been able to create a flyover of the area around Titan's largest and second largest seas, known as Kraken Mare and Ligeia Mare, respectively, and some of the nearby lakes.' 



'The Curiosity mission has achieved another milestone as scientists have determined that the rocks inside Gale Crater that were analyzed by the rover are very old – even on geologic time scales, but were exposed very recently. The achievement of utilizing in-situ age-dating methods using radiogenic and cosmogenic noble gases marks a first in planetary exploration.' 

Visit National Parks on other worlds.

Cold War Christmas Cards from the USSR.

Five Billion Years Of Solitude

Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

On clear summer nights when I was quite young, I used to like to sit out on the lawn in an old chair and look up at the stars. There wasn't much light pollution back then, at the edge of the Cotswolds, so the sky was full of stars. And I'd wonder, as so many do, if a world much like Earth might be orbiting them, and if a boy much like me might be looking up at its night sky, and the insignificant star that was the Sun.

The profound question of whether we are alone in the Universe - if Earth and humankind are unique, or if there are many Earth-like worlds harbouring other forms of intelligent life - is the topic of Lee Billings's Five Billion Years of Solitude. 4.6 billion years after it was formed, Earth sits at the centre of a small expanding sphere of radio noise that might be detected by other civilisations, and astronomers have begun to catalogue a vast variety of exoplanets. Could any of them harbour life? What would it look like if they did? And is there anyone else out there, as lonely as we are?

Billings frames the history of the search for extrasolar planets and plans to search for Earth-like worlds within biographical portraits of planet hunters, from Frank Drake to rising star Sara Seager, who plans to use relatively cheap nanosatellites to monitor single stars for signs of transiting planets. I would have preferred a little more science rather than noveletish descriptions of what Billings's interviewees happened to be doing and wearing when he met them, and because all of them are American the work of astronomers from other countries is somewhat scanted. Michel Mayer, who led the team which discovered the first exoplanet, is given only a passing mention; the work of the HARPS project, a collaboration between a Swiss team led by Mayer and the European Southern Observatory's telescope in Chile, is presented in terms of competition with an American team rather than in its own right.

But these are minor quibbles. Billings expertly anatomises the difficulties in detecting the faint jitters in the motion of stars or the minute dimming in their luminosity that signals the presence of exoplanets, evokes the teeming variety of exoplanets so far discovered and the problems astronomers hunting for Earth-sized exoplanets must overcome.  He's very good, too, on the labyrinthine politics of NASA which have stalled the Terrestrial Planet Finder project, and the ongoing problems with the vastly expensive James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble. And his entanglement of the lives of the planet hunters with their work reminds us that their discoveries provide us with new and humbling perspectives on our place in the universe and the evanescence of our tenancy on this planet.

The universe is vast, and old. Billings uses the stump of a redwood tree in Frank Drake's backyard to provide a lovely and sobering lesson about deep time. Growth rings show that the tree was more than 2000 years old. During that time

'the Sun had scarcely budged in its 250-million-year orbit about the galactic center, and, considering its life span of billions of years, hadn't aged a day. Since their formation 4.6 billion years ago, our Sun and its planets have made perhaps eighteen galactic orbits - our solar system is eighteen "galactic years" old. When it was seventeen, redwood trees did not yet exist on Earth. When it was sixteen, simple organisms were taking their first tentative excursions from the sea to colonise the land. In fact, fossil evidence testified that for about fifteen of its eighteen galactic years, our planet had played host to little more than unicellular microbes and multicellular bacterial colonies, and was utterly devoid of anything so complicated as grass, trees, or animals, let alone beings capable of solving differential equations, building rockets, painting landscapes, writing symphonies, or feeling love.'

The first confirmed discovery of an exoplanet was made less only twenty years ago. Although more than a thousand have been discovered since then, it's a microscopic sample of the trillions believed to exist in our galaxy. A few are Earth-sized, but none found so far are known to be Earth-like, and we're still a long way from discovering evidence for life on another world, let alone any intelligent beings that might also be searching for traces of other life in the immense sea of stars. 'We're the product of millions of years of evolution,' Sara Seager says, 'but we don't have any time to waste.'

alt.shuttle

NASA's space shuttle programme was started when the Cold War began to grow hot: the first flights took place in the era of Cruise missiles, Protect and Survive, the doctrine of a winnable nuclear war uncovered by Robert Sheer's With Enough Shovels, The Day After, and Frankie Goes To Hollywood's 'Two Tribes'. The Soviet authorities realised that the shuttle had serious military uses, and decided to start their own programme. The spacecraft in the image above, Buran, is the only Soviet shuttle to have reached orbit. Launched in November 1988, it was unmanned, completed two orbits of the Earth, and landed under automatic guidance. There's more information about it here and here.

Within a year, history had overtaken the Buran programme. The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the authorities realised that their space shuttle was an expensive dead end which could no longer be justified, and shut it down (the USA took somewhat longer to come to the same conclusion). Four shuttles were under construction at the time. One, nicknamed Ptichka (Little Bird), is stored in the Baikonur Cosmodrome alongside a non-flying prototype; another, Baikal, is parked on an airfield; the other two have been partially or completely dismantled. Two  prototypes are on public display: one in Gorky Park, Moscow; the other in the Technik Museum Speyer, Germany.

As for Buran, the only Soviet shuttle to have orbited the Earth, it was destroyed when the roof of the hangar in which it is was being stored at Baikonur collapsed. An ignominious end to the avatar of an alternate history which might have intensified the cold war in low Earth orbit, or which might have seen two kinds of space shuttles servicing the International Space Station, but which otherwise, let's face it, probably wouldn't have been very different to our own history.

Links 07/12/13

As the TV schedules fill up with seasonal specials, end-of-year best of's, and blockbuster films you've either avoided or already seen, here are a few episodes from Out of the Unknown, a fantastic series of SF plays the BBC screened in four series between 1965 and 1971. Helmed by Irene Shubik, many were adapted from original stories by leading US and UK authors of the day. Although most were wiped when the precious videotape on which they were recorded was reused, around twenty survive. So far, no one has released on official DVD collection, although bootlegs exist. And there's also YouTube:

Thirteen to Centaurus, by J.G. Ballard




The Machine Stops, by E.M.Forster




 
Tunnel Under The World, by Frederik Pohl




Some Lapse Of Time, by John Brunner




 No Place Like Earth, by John Wyndham

Work In Progress

Something Coming Through printed out, ready for annotation towards the fourth and final draft.

Livres En Français

Some titles from my backlist are now available in French as ebooks at very reasonable prices. Click images for links.

Links 30/11/13

'When a star explodes as a supernova, it shines brightly for a few weeks or months before fading away. Yet the material blasted outward from the explosion still glows hundreds or thousands of years later, forming a picturesque supernova remnant. What powers such long-lived brilliance?
'In the case of Tycho's supernova remnant, astronomers have discovered that a reverse shock wave racing inward at Mach 1000 (1000 times the speed of sound) is heating the remnant and causing it to emit X-ray light.'

'Moving entire stars rather than building spaceships would have certain benefits as a way of traveling through the galaxy. After all, it would mean taking your local environment with you on a millennial journey. Some have suggested it might therefore be an observable sign of highly advanced civilizations at work. But how would you move a star in the first place?'
 
'If life does exist anywhere else in the universe, it may only be fleeting. Now scientists are researching how signs of life might look on dying planets'

A tiny four-winged robot that mimics the movements of jellyfish to stay in the air.

The politics of Doctor Who.

The only ATMs in Antarctica.

XKCD: Oort Cloud.

Ongoing

I'm getting close to the end of the third draft of Something Coming Through, although the process is more like Zeno's Paradox than a sprint to the finishing line. The last chapter doesn't require much rewriting, but to get there I have to add new material and repurpose what's already been written. This is the draft where the narrative is finally pinned down, so the last chapters have to play out and reflect the consequences of all the changes I've made in the rest of the book. After this, I'll print out the manuscript and go over it again, concentrating on the flow of sentences and paragraphs rather than events, and then transcribe all the red ink scribbles into the electronic MSS.

Meanwhile, here are three newish anthologies that feature stories of mine. Click on the cover images for more information.

Links 23/11/13

"We are presenting a set of cheeses made using bacteria from the human body."

Perfume made from Lady Gaga's urine.

'Scientists have practically obliterated the ultimate symbol of maleness in DNA, the Y chromosome, and believe they may be able to do away with it completely.'

'An intact population of microorganisms that derive food and benefit from other organisms living in the intestine is required for optimal response to cancer therapy, according to a mouse study by scientists at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, and their collaborators.'

 'On this sun-blasted tract of sand 14 miles south of Baker, molecular biologist and entrepreneur J. Craig Venter is field-testing a technology that he says will revolutionize the search for extraterrestrial life.
Not only does Venter say his invention will detect and decode DNA hiding in otherworldly soil or water samples — proving once and for all that we are not alone in the universe — it will beam that information back to Earth and allow scientists to reconstruct living copies in a biosafety facility.'

Roads Not Taken

I recently signed the contracts for Something Coming Through, and am nearing the end of the third draft. When it's published, it will be my twentieth novel. Which is some kind of achievement, I guess. Here are a few that didn't get finished, for various reasons. Every novelist will have similar stories of books scuttled because of bad timing, bad luck, or the realisation that there was a better novel to be written. On the whole, I think I've gotten off lightly.

Untitled sequel to Eternal Light - which would have been my fourth novel, until I realised, after writing a synopsis and a couple of chapters, that I had nothing useful to add to what had already been published. So I wrote something completely different - Red Dust, Tibetan cowboys on Mars - instead.

Pasquale's America - again, a synopis and a few chapters were written for this sequel to my Renaissance steampunk novel Pasquale's Angel, but I'd just changed publishers and couldn't get the rights back for Pasquale's Angel, so that, as they say, was that.

Alessi's Comet - a science fiction novel that was halfway through the first draft when my publishers decided they had no enthusiasm for publishing science fiction any more.

Gone Dead Train and Bad Genes.  Two thrillers. Gone Dead Train was a sequel to my surveillance thriller Whole Wide World, but I moved publishers (again) and had the same problem as with Pasquale's America. Bad Genes (terrible title) was a new direction that I gave up while halfway into the first draft when a publishing deal fell through. Hey ho.

The Disappeared was going to be the sequel to my MMORPG thriller Players, turned down by my then publisher.

Manswarm - an idea about a murder mystery set in a hyperpopulated London that never got further than a synopsis, because I decided to write The Quiet War instead. Good move.

London Endless - I've written several stories about Mr Carlyle, a long-lived private investigator with a great deal of knowledge about 'the matter of the dead'; I wrote a very detailed chapter-by-chapter synopsis for an American publishing deal that fell through when the enthusiastic editor lost his job because of bizarre publishing nonsense. The only orphan on this list I might return to, one day.

Links 16/11/13

While I slowly close in on the end of the third draft of the ongoing, some random stuff I encountered this week on the internets:

The moss mantis.

CV Dazzle make up which fools facial recognition algorithms.

'Reconstructing the rise of life during the period of Earth’s history when it first evolved is challenging. Earth’s oldest sedimentary rocks are not only rare, but also almost always altered by hydrothermal and tectonic activity. A new study from a team including Carnegie’s Nora Noffke, a visiting investigator, and Robert Hazen revealed the well-preserved remnants of a complex ecosystem in a nearly 3.5 billion-year-old sedimentary rock sequence in Australia.' 

 The first and last flight of Buran, the Soviet Union's space shuttle.

'Earlier this week, Nature got a rare glimpse of the National Wildlife Property Repository near Denver, a 1,200-square-metre warehouse where the US Fish and Wildlife Service stores 1.5 million items — most of which were seized by law enforcement when they were brought into the country illegally. It is an eerie place stacked with heads of tigers, bags of seahorses and boots made from crocodile skin.'

See also: The Whale Warehouse.

The evolution of Mars - 4 billion years in under two minutes:

My Grandfather's War

When I was born, the end of the First World War was much closer in time than the end of the Second World War is to us, now - a strange, sobering thought. And when I was growing up, there were still plenty of WW1 veterans alive. One of them was my grandfather, Albert Charles Austin. He joined the Sussex Yeomanry, and as part of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force fought in Palestine.  Here he is, with some of his comrades (the purple x is my mother's):

He fought in the Second or Third Battle of Gaza; afterwards he took a photograph of a disabled Mark 1 tank:

At one point he photographed Bedouin arms - flintlock rifles and pistols - abandoned, according to the writing on the back, in Gares Abud (possibly the village of Aboud):

And he was present at or shortly after the liberation of Jerusalem. Here's a photograph of Bab al-Amud, the Damascus Gate:

He was a Victorian, born before the first aeroplane flight in a shepherd's cottage on the Sussex Downs, one of eighteen children. And around the age of twenty he was taking part in a battle with tanks, and soon afterwards saw Jerusalem, then still largely contained within those walls without which, according to a hymn he must have sung in church, was that faraway green hill. But let's not romanticise his war too much. In May 1918, his regiment moved to France, and was involved in the Battle of the Somme of 1918.  And it was there, or soon afterwards, that he was taken prisoner, and spent the rest of the war in forced labour.

I'm vague about most details of his war service because he never talked about it. It marked him for the rest of his life: he was a taciturn, solitary man, and spent much of his time working alone, as a gardener. It marked his wife, my grandmother too, and their children, my uncle and my mother (who because of my father's war service had a deep interest in Lawrence of Arabia, but that's another story). Wars cast long shadows. But on this day I like to remember him pottering in his vegetable patch, in the green shade of a peaceful summer evening of the long ago. I like to think that digging was a kind of assertion. Not of victory, because that's too strong a word, too loaded, but of nothing more than his survival of history.

Links 09/11/11

So I wrote a review of Gravity for the Arc tumblr.

'Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have observed a unique and baffling object in the asteroid belt that looks like a rotating lawn sprinkler or badminton shuttlecock. While this object is on an asteroid-like orbit, it looks like a comet, and is sending out tails of dust into space.'


'This population of berry-shaped bacteria is so different from any other known bacteria, it has been classified as not only a new species, but also a new genus, the next level of classifying the diversity of life. Its discoverers named it Tersicoccus phoenicis. Tersi is from Latin for clean, like the room. Coccus, from Greek for berry, describes the bacterium's shape. The phoenicis part is for NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, the spacecraft being prepared for launch in 2007 when the bacterium was first collected by test-swabbing the floor in the Florida clean room.'

'“What this means is, when you look up at the thousands of stars in the night sky, the nearest sun-like star with an Earth-size planet in its habitable zone is probably only 12 light years away and can be seen with the naked eye. That is amazing,” said UC Berkeley graduate student Erik Petigura, who led the analysis of the Kepler and Keck Observatory data.'


Kepler Orrery:



The sounds of interstellar space.

'What is the whales motivation? You dont know.' One-star Amazon reviews of Moby-Dick.  (via Hari Kunzra)

Links 01/11/13

Not a link as such - I'm appearing at the World Fantasy convention in Brighton this Saturday. I'll be signing books at a couple of launches, and doing a panel on 'Does SF have a future?' at 5pm. Say hi if you're attending.  Meanwhile:

New views of Titan reveal salt flats around its lakes, and the giant hydrocarbon dunes of the equatorial region dubbed ''Senkyo.''

'The United Nations is forming an "International Asteroid Warning Group" on the advice of an association of former astronauts, to share data about threatening asteroids. In a set of forthcoming recommendations, the Association of Space Explorers (ASE) will loosely outline the emergency steps that the UN's longstanding Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space must take if the asteroid warning group identifies an extinction-level space rock on a collision course with Earth. (The best option, according to ASE, would be to crash a spacecraft into the asteroid to knock it off course.)'

'A video based on topographical data of Mars taken by a European satellite gives Earth-dwellers an aerial view of the red planet's surface.'

'Six students from De Montfort University won first prize in the Off The Map challenge when they turned maps of seventeenth centuryLondon into a detailed 3D world.'

'Deep below the streets of New York City lie its vital organs—a water system, subways, railroads, tunnels, sewers, drains, and power and cable lines—in a vast, three-dimensional tangle. Penetrating this centuries-old underworld of caverns, squatters, and unmarked doors, William Langewiesche follows three men who constantly navigate its dangers: the subway-operations chief who dealt with the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, the engineer in charge of three underground mega-projects, and the guy who, well, just loves exploring the dark, jerry-rigged heart of a great metropolis.'

Clear

'Did you ever go clear?' Leonard Cohen

So last week I got the results of a CT scan - my seventh since I was diagnosed with bowel cancer in October 2010. The tumour was surgically removed, but because it had grown through the bowel wall and invaded a single lymph node by the time symptoms had become become apparent, there was a strong chance (about 60%) that it would appear elsewhere.

As long as bowel and many other cancers are diagnosed early enough, it isn't the original tumour that kills you (and you aren't 'cured' when it's removed - XKCD has a very good explanation of this). No, it's most often the secondaries, created by metastasis. In the case of bowel cancer, these usually appear in the lungs or liver.  Presenting not as lung or liver cancer, but proliferating nodules similary to the primary tumour.  The problem is, doctors can't yet detect cancer cells floating free in the blood or lymph. That's why, after surgery, I was treated with chemotherapy: infused every two weeks or so with a carefully calibrated cocktail of chemicals that killed off dividing cells (before every treatment, you're weighed like a prize fighter).  It's rather like napalming a jungle to get rid of a few pesky insurgents. You don't know that they're there when you strike; you can't be certain you've killed them afterwards; you cause a lot of collateral damage. Most cells in the human body are eventually replaced by new ones; epithelial cells and cells in the marrow, generating various kinds of blood cells, amongst others, proliferate continuously. Until, that is, they are blasted with cytotoxic chemicals. During my treatment, blood platelet and white blood cell counts plummeted; I developed mouth and tongue ulcers, and various digestive upsets as cells lining my GI tract died and sloughed away. Other side effects included fatigue, memory loss and cognitive disfunction (chemobrain); I've been left with peripheral neuropathy in my feet and fingertips because one of the drugs, a platinum compound, attacked my sensory nerves. I also suffered side effects from the steroids and other drugs pumped into me to counter the side effects of the chemotherapy - although at least I was never stricken by nausea.

Oh, and I can't drink coffee now. So it goes.

Every six months, I was scanned: photocopied by multiple X-rays which were assembled into a 3D image and carefully examined to discover whether or not secondary tumours were growing elsewhere. You quickly get used to the minor ordeal of being infused with contrast dye and fed through a giant white doughnut that sounds alarmingly like a washing machine about to spin itself to fragments; you never get used to scanxiety, a clumsy but highly accurate neologism for the state of mind endured before the scan, and afterwards, while you wait for the results. Kind of like jumping out of a plane, and then waiting a week or so until you know the chute is going to open. Or not.

I've been lucky. Each scan has been clear; the latest is also clear, and hopefully will be my last. After three years, the statistical chance of secondary tumours arising in liver, lungs, or elsewhere is hugely reduced. I'll continue to have blood tests for a tumour marker, but if all goes well I will no longer need to be photocopied.

I'm not cured, of course. That milestone is declared after five years, although it's a notional date; there's still a small chance that the cancer could return after that. And after you've survived cancer you are in a different place. You've been betrayed at a cellular level; you've been rudely and violently confronted with your own mortality; you've undergone several years of anxiety and uncertainty and extremely high vigilance, worrying over small aches and pains that beforehand would have gone unremarked. You've changed. But after a war fought on your behalf, with your body as a battleground, you have survived. You can begin to make long-term plans again. You can take up your new life.

It's a good feeling.

Thor: The Dark World

Following on from Thor and The Avengers, Thor: The Dark World is the latest in Marvel's project to map its universe into film. Like the first Thunder God flick, it's a sword and ray-gun epic, using Clarke's third law to explain the Norse gods' powers and accoutrements as advanced technology (the rainbow bridge, Bifrost, is the entrance to a suite of wormholes, there are force fields, glancing references to nanotechnology and so on); unlike its predecessor, it's a ponderous epic, attempting to mesh the ongoing romance between scientist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) with a by-the-numbers struggle against a villain who threatens to end the universe by unleashing a powerful amorphous substance, red matter - sorry, aether - when the nine worlds align.

I liked the original Thor comics when I was a teenager; and I liked the first film, too, for its marvellous depiction of Asgard, Tom Hiddleston's mercurial Loki, and the vigour and charm of Hemsworth's Thor, a superhero who actually had fun with his powers and needed only to learn a little humility to come into his own. The sequel looks just as lovely, but is far more hectic, a space-opera version of Lord of the Rings coloured by Norse mythology.  Tom Hiddleston and Rene Russo (reprising her role as Odin's wife, Freya) give standout performances, but Hemsworth's Thor is dialed-down to gloomy king-in-waiting, for most of the film Portman's Foster is little more than a plot coupon, and Chris Eccelston's dark elf is a one-dimensional all-evil-all-of-the-time villain.  As if to make up for the thinness of the story, it's crammed with action and eye-kicks - notably a space ship smashing its way into the Hall of Asgard.  There's some nice business during a breakout from Asgard, and it does lighten up a little when Thor gets back to Earth (there are a couple of good jokes, and one that might have worked if the writers had bothered to look at a Tube map), but otherwise it rarely rises above your basic by-the-numbers universe-in-peril schtick.  Stick with the credits crawl: there's a teaser for the next in the sequence, and right at the end, after all the pixel wranglers and digital wizards, as if no room could be found for it amongst the thud and blunder, there's a small, quiet, human moment.  Fun to watch as long as you suspend all judgement, but in the end another triumph of CGI spectacle over actual story.